Facebook’s Kick-Ass: Restricted Worlds Collide

Let’s start with a confession: I went to the movies last night—and I went to see Hot Tub Time Machine! Yes, I admit it, I laughed till my belly ached, my eyes teared and my bladder wobbled on the verge of erupting. I’m tempted now to peg my pants in honor of the 80’s and sit down with a bag of Cheetohs and RC cola and watch every John Cusack film made between 1980 and 1989 and for good measure I’ll throw in The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful & 16 Candles.

However, this isn’t about 80’s cinema and pop culture either, but to be perfectly honest, it does have something to do with popular culture today: Facebook. Let me explain—we’ve all seen the steady infiltration of commercials and advertising into pre-film minutes. The quiet anticipatory moments before a film are now filled with “First Looks”, Fathom Events ads, brought to you by Coke moments and a plethora of other brands and names that have turned the movie-going experience into something closer to sitting at home and watching TV.

Before Hot Tub got rolling there was a long list of comedy and Jerry Bruckheimer shlock trailers thrown at the audience including the forthcoming Kick-Ass, a super-hero spoof with stars of the mega comedy hit Superbad. At the end of the trailer an ad popped up instructing the audience to visit Facebook and “fan Kick-Ass” for restricted content.

You see where this is going now? Yeah, I did a double take too. I’m sitting in a movie theater on a Saturday night watching commercials, which even though I understand why they’re showing them still gets my blood boiling, and am now being told that I can get more “kick-ass”, restricted content, from Facebook? Yowzah! I want my $2 right now! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Let’s think about this logically you go to the movies to escape what Joseph Campbell, perhaps the world’s greatest comparative mythologist, termed in The Power of Myth as the needle in the arm that is TV, to join into a kind of communal experience called ‘the movies.’ In order to experience the movies one has to take a journey to a movie theater and join a group of fellow individuals who are there for a similar experience. As a collective group, and not a very large one when you consider how many fit into a single auditorium, we’re instructed to visit our exclusive Facebook accounts and become fans in order to receive restricted content. As we all know nothing sells like s-e-x or violence, so are you ready for some Kick-Ass?

So what? Why is this important?

The key take-away here is that these various channels and technologies are converging because of the social-network frenzy of the up and coming generation who represent major purchasing dollars now and down the road. According to a recent webinar by eMarketer where they cited a Deloite study from December of '09, 41% of millenials (ages 14-26) update their social network pages from their mobile phones compared to 46% who send email from their mobile phones. Convergence anyone? So what does the phone have to do with this? Think about it, you’re sitting in the theater and see an ad for Restricted-Content, doesn’t that make you curious?

In our world, immediate curiosity is satisfied immediately via cellular data. From our vantage point higher up in the auditorium I saw the distinct glow of mobile phone screens flicker in the darkness as people took the cue and went straight to their Facebook accounts during the trailers and became fans of Kick-Ass. Do I want to strangle whoever thought up this social promotion, absolutely, but what a great idea, wish I thought of it first!

It’s not that we need another reminder of why we should engage with customers on social networks, but rather this represents a good example of how content can be made immediate and exclusive through social channels.

So what’s the pay off?

For the end user it’s access to content that he or she may have not stumbled across without the ad to help them. The user can now virally distribute this content through his or her network of friends by posting internally to their Facebook community and externally by sharing it via Twitter and other social networks proving just how in the know her or she is.

For the marketer there are relatively easy metrics to cull out of a campaign like this? If you’re prompting users to add this in a movie theater then you should see small flurries of people becoming fans of your page in two hour chunks. This is the proof in the pudding that driving readership of your Facebook fan site from a five second trailer spot is working.

Smart marketers will take this one step further and create exclusive offers within the trailer ad that will incorporate SMS. Imagine including a short code that will deliver exclusive content directly to your phone like wallpaper or a ring tone, above and beyond the advertised “restricted” content you can find on Facebook? How cool will you be amongst your friends when you sport your Kick-Ass new iPhone wallpaper? According to the same study 86% of millenials are texting from their mobile phones. So, do you need another reason to take social in the same serious breath as you do email? What about mobile?

Milenials are using social networks in equal proportion to email—this is driving the need to adopt social as not only a viable but key channel for communicating with the new generation. Think about it this way, if your parents are on Facebook, and in some cases your grandparents, the adoption of this channel by baby boomers and the younger generations up to the leg warmer 80’s is being driven because their grandchildren are rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth, fans of everything social. Smart, savvy grandparents don’t have to ask the question “why haven’t you called?” They can simply post on their [grand]kid’s walls “Call me!” So go on, think of creative mobile/social/email convergences, and do it quickly, as there’s no time like the present.

Cheers!
Len Shneyder
Director of Deliverability & Messaging
Unica | Pivotal Veracity